Preface 
HE details in the main part of this book 
—namely, in the first part, relating to 
my uncle John Smith—are derived from 
notes or memories of my own close 
intimacy with him, when he was getting on in 
years. I saw him often; and in him, others 
assured me, I might see what earlier generations 
of our family had been like. Yet, much as he 
may have resembled his forefathers, he had his 
own individuality ; by which I mean that he was 
always sincere with himself. If he fancied he 
liked anything his father and mother had liked, 
it had to win his own approval too, or it had no 
chance with him. Probably even this was an 
hereditary trait; probably he was in nothing so 
much like his father as in a certain unbending at- 
titude in which, with all his amiability, he never 
departed from the convictions he had proved, the 
behaviour he had adopted, for himself. 
And being thus faithful to his own views, 
which presumably were those of his childhood, 
traditional in his ancestry, John Smith was, it 
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